Purgatory
by Lirazel
Summary: This is like a hotel room, where you live out of your suitcase, knowing in a few days you’ll get to go home. Oneshot.


Purgatory

"This is like a hotel room, where you live out of your suitcase, knowing in a few days you'll get to go home." Oneshot.

_Disclaimer: I don't own _Battlestar Galactica_, any of its characters, settings, or technologies. I am not making any money off of this._

Note: This was originally supposed to be a very different fic, one I'll no doubt write later, but it morphed into this, and I liked it. The original piece was from Cally's point of view, and that works for this still, but it could conceivably have anyone for a narrator: Starbuck or Laura or a random unnamed woman. That having been said, I hope you enjoy it, no matter whose view you view it from.

--------

Space is cold. She knows this from years on the _Galactica _where cold lurked around the edges of everything, held at bay by baggy jumpsuits and roaring engines that you forget are there until suddenly, for no reason you can name, you become aware of their growl again.

Space was sterile, too, with a smell of recycled air and ozone, sharp edges, clean yet blocky lines, everything metal and plastic and bolts of cloth made in bulk. Grey and navy blues and army greens and black out beyond the glass. But then—there were stars.

This cold is different, bone deep and biting, settling a deep ache inside of her and never really departing. The air smells cold, and, strangely, mineral, not fresh and bright like Caprica. Everything is makeshift and ramshackle, leaning under the weight of the wind and half covered with mud. She remembers the Colonies as vibrant greens and golden sunlight and skies and oceans so blue that it hurt. She imagines Earth that way, too, but more so. But this place is colors as muted and wane as the _Galactica_ ever was, only without the reassurance of straight-shot corridors and geometric shapes.

There's something _wrong _about this place, and it's not the poverty and the squalor and the mud and the cold. She figures out what it is one night, sitting in front of a cobbled-together space heater puffing lukewarm air and ozone stink that makes her eerily homesick, wrapped in too-many but not-enough layers of clothes, hair lank and skin smudged because it's too cold to wash: nothing ever dries.

This place is neither earth nor space, not nature or manmade, not organic or geometric, not colors or neutrals. It's a lingering between, a purgatory.

The label is oddly fitting from what she remembers studying in school about the ancient religions. Purgatory is after life, but not really death, a waiting room of sorts to cleanse you of enough of your sins to get you into paradise.

She wonders, though, if the residents of that purgatory realized that that was where they were. Perhaps that was what the purging agent was: the hell of the waiting, the not knowing, that drove away sins, and maybe they had this same suspended feeling she has—like she's drifting in space after going EV and not knowing whether there's anyone to come pull her in, like she's falling and falling and falling and has no idea when—if—she's going to strike the bottom.

Because it's like that, all the time. This place is not a home in any way, not like Caprica and the _Galactica _were, not like Earth will be. She can't get comfortable here, and, after almost a year, she still hasn't unpacked. She can't. This is like a hotel room, where you live out of your suitcase, just taking out your pajamas and toothbrush and ignoring the drawers they provide but no one uses, knowing in a few days you'll get to go home, back to your stuff, your family, your space.

The suspended feeling leaves her always feeling vaguely sick to the stomach—not enough to ever throw up, but it's always there. And that is how she knows—knows with no doubts at all, but with no real reasons, either, since now there is no reason to run—that this is not home. This is not where they will end up, this is not a new Colony. One day—she doesn't know when—they will move on and forward. She will make it back to the _Galactica_, her home, and the rest of humanity—this filthy, ragged, weary band of nerves and paranoia, refugees and vagabonds—will find Earth, and they will settle and build homes and have children and create art and dream dreams again.

She yearns for that so much that everything else feels pale in comparison, and at night she rails against the Gods or whatever powers there might be: _why_? What sins did mankind commit that were so grievous that they must linger in this purgatory, its own kind of hell?

Because they're paying for them, a hundredfold. Every hungry-eyed child, every shivering elderly person, every body buried in the ice-mud ground tells her this.

One day, toiling in the clammy air under a too-pale sun, sweaty, muddy, bone tired, shivering, she admits it to herself. She knows what their sin is, and it is so earth-shatteringly obvious that it makes her even sicker than normal, till she has to fight to keep her bite of lunch down: They tried to create life. Not in the natural way, birthing children, raising crops, planting flowers. But to take something that is not alive and give it consciousness, to create in their own image.

And they came close, so very close that it's scary. The Cylons act like them, move like them, speak like them, even think like them.

But they are not like them. She cannot explain why; she's not trained in science or philosophy to understand the solid, concrete differences. But her gut never fails her, and it tells her: they can plan, but cannot dream; can know, but cannot have faith; can wish, but cannot hope; can feel attachment and affect, but cannot love.

And because mankind came so close but failed by so much (_by everything that matters_), they pay for it now. Every callous from trying to pry rock out of thin soil, every degree drop of temperature, every failed crop, every person old before his time, every child that dies of hunger and cold, every dream that perishes is penance, purgatory.

But that's one of the differences between them and the Cylons, she reminds herself.

Humans can hope.

-------------------------------

Reviews are greatly appreciated.


End file.
